Everyone Does IT (and some Raspberry Pi gotchas) (Shallow Thoughts)

Everyone Does IT (and some Raspberry Pi gotchas)

I've been quiet for a while, partly because I've been busy preparing for a booth at the upcoming Everyone Does IT event at PEEC, organized by LANL.

In addition to booths from quite a few LANL and community groups, they'll show the movie "CODE: Debugging the Gender Gap" in the planetarium, I checked out the movie last week (our library has it) and it's a good overview of the problem of diversity, and especially the problems women face in in programming jobs.

I'll be at the Los Alamos Makers/Coder Dojo booth, where we'll be showing an assortment of Raspberry Pi and Arduino based projects. We've asked the Coder Dojo kids to come by and show off some of their projects. I'll have my RPi crittercam there (such as it is) as well as another Pi running motioneyeos, for comparison. (Motioneyeos turned out to be remarkably difficult to install and configure, and doesn't seem to do any better than my lightweight scripts at detecting motion without false positives. But it does offer streaming video, which might be nice for a booth.) I'll also be demonstrating cellular automata and the Game of Life (especially since the CODE movie uses Life as a background in quite a few scenes), music playing in Python, a couple of Arduino-driven NeoPixel LED light strings, and possibly an arm-waving penguin I built a few years ago for GetSET, if I can get it working again: the servos aren't behaving reliably, but I'm not sure yet whether it's a problem with the servos and their wiring or a power supply problem.

The music playing script turned up an interesting Raspberry Pi problem. The Pi has a headphone output, and initially when I plugged a powered speaker into it, the program worked fine. But then later, it didn't. After much debugging, it turned out that the difference was that I'd made myself a user so I could have my normal shell environment. I'd added my user to the audio group and all the other groups the default "pi" user is in, but the Pi's pulseaudio is set up to allow audio only from users root and pi, and it ignores groups. Nobody seems to have found a way around that, but sudo apt-get purge pulseaudio solved the problem nicely.

I also hit a minor snag attempting to upgrade some of my older Raspbian installs: lightdm can't upgrade itself (Errors were encountered while processing: lightdm). Lots of people on the web have hit this, and nobody has found a way around it; the only solution seems to be to abandon the old installation and download a new Raspbian image.

But I think I have all my Raspbian cards installed and working now; pulseaudio is gone, music plays, the Arduino light shows run. Now to play around with servo power supplies and see if I can get my penguin's arms waving again when someone steps in front of him. Should be fun, and I can't wait to see the demos the other booths will have.

If you're in northern New Mexico, come by Everyone Does IT this Tuesday night! It's 5:30-7:30 at PEEC, the Los Alamos Nature Center, and everybody's welcome.